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McAfee calls a holy war on Bible Apps

by on17 September 2015


Going after the Bible Belt vote

Presidential hopeful John McAfee may not be trying to hawk his security software any more, but he can still scare the hell out of christian sysadmins.

Talking to the Lawtech 2015 conference on Australia's Gold Coast, McAfee demonstrated the insecurity of their Android mobes with the first live-phish Vulture South has seen outside a hacker conference.

He warned them that the Android OS was fundamentally incompatible with the sensitivity of what any law company deals with on its network because people are worth money in the Android ecosystem.

McAfee said that was why apps demand excessive permissions.

"Once those permissions are granted, there's damn little you can do about it, apart from removing the app," he said.

To prove his point he had written a flashlight app for the conference and asked people to write something on their notepads, photograph it, and press "send."

Some of the attendees allowed the app use the front camera to take a photo of the user, and their e-mail app.

"There's not a single flashlight app that's not spying on you right now," he said, simply because of the permissions we grant to apps.

He said it took him three hours to turn on the flash, take a picture, and send it to me via e-mail – your e-mail by the way.

But he said that in the US bible-reading applications were the biggest security nightmare. Every single one of those applications asks permission to turn on your microphone, your camera, it wants permission to read your e-mails and the right to send e-mails wherever it chooses.

Apparently the permissions also include SMS, video, photos, all of which can be wrapped up and sent to a fundamental religious group called "Focus on the Family", he said.

It is unlikely he will be elected, but you have to admire his presidentual platform – and so much better informed than Donald Trump.

Last modified on 17 September 2015
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